Tag Archives | Noreena Hertz

Noreena Hertz outlines her concerns about Google Glass (she calls them “Glasses” but the actual name assigned by Google is “Glass”) in the Wall Street Journal. Have any disinfonauts tried them yet? Thoughts?

…My concern, having tried on a pair of Google Glasses myself, and also seen Google’s own early marketing efforts, is that they’ll be more often “deployed” in a far less altruistic and far more intrusive way.

We’re already living in a world in which we’ve all got cameras to the ready via the smartphones in our pockets, so to a considerable extent we can already easily transform ourselves into paparazzi, as well as easily be paparazzi’s prey. But when I wore them I was taken aback at just how covert they allowed photography and filming to be.

All you have to do is whisper–“record” or “take a photo” or even just wink, and the moment, conversation, or exchange is captured with the subject of your filming left completely unaware, their consent never given.

Noreena Hertz joins disinformation’s Gary Baddeley to discuss her new book, “Eyes Wide Open.” They discuss corporate personhood and the issue of rights without responsibilities, Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis, how and why the US government made the decisions that ended in the demise of Lehman and the bailout of other Wall Street banks, and how to make decisions amongst a deluge of information, not least from “experts” who may very well be providing misleading or plain wrong advice…

In this eye-opening handbook, the internationally noted speaker, economics expert, and bestselling author of “IOU: The Debt Threat” and “The Silent Takeover” reveals the extent to which the biggest decisions in our lives are often made on the basis of flawed information, weak assumptions, corrupted data, insufficient scrutiny of others, and a lack of self-knowledge.

Noreena Hertz, dubbed one of the world’s leading thinkers and one of the top 10 most followed professors on Twitter, says that a post-luxe era needs co-op capitalism, writing in Wired:

The world desperately needs a new form of capitalism. One that would trump the version we’re living with, which I’ve named “Gucci capitalism” because it overvalues status and undervalues equity. We’re more ashamed not to have a new Gucci handbag (or any luxe brand, come to that) than to get in debt. The ideal replacement, “co-op capitalism”, prioritises collective destiny. It would value the network and see connectivity as a social, political and economic goal. It would recognise the import of relationships — and understand that how an exchange takes place impacts upon its outcome. It would prioritise social cohesion.

Whereas Gucci capitalism was about beggar thy neighbour, co-op capitalism recognises that collaboration can trump competition. Where Gucci capitalism was about individual success, co-op capitalism is about our collective future and interdependencies.

My good friend, Cambridge University economics professor and celebrity Noreena Hertz, has given an interesting interview to German news service Spiegel Online in which she says capitalism is about to change:

Hertz: I am convinced that we are at a turning point in capitalism. The financial crisis could only come about because people were too focused on growth without asking where this growth comes from and at what cost. The crisis was a wake-up call for many people who accepted the rules of the old system. And many people — from policymakers to academics to economists to politicians, but also the man on the street — are starting to question whether the old rules were actually fair, just or right.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You call it the switch from Gucci capitalism to cooperative capitalism.

Hertz: In Gucci capitalism, people believed that the markets were absolutely rational and reliable. Economists created models with cartoon-like assumptions about people as super-rational profit maximizers.

I've known Noreena Hertz most of my (and her) life. She's always been my most mentally able friend. I don't know what her IQ is, except that it's off the charts. Her list of achievments at early ages is beyond prodigy. There was a risk, though, of going off the rails, and no doubt some of the more establishment politicians and economists thought that was exactly what she had done when she started writing and speaking about how the underpinnings of modern capitalist economies were unsustainable and inevitably heading towards massive crises.
Well she's finally getting her dues, as this profile in Fast Company shows:

Not long ago, economist Noreena Hertz lived at the lefty margins of her field. But her (widely ignored) prediction of the credit crisis and her call for a more evolved form of capitalism have suddenly put her at the center of the universe.
Noreena Hertz had to seduce Bono...